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The team arrived at the venue nice and early on Saturday, a lot earlier than normal as we had to prepare for our first live streamed event to the internet. 10th Legion Championship Fighting was going to be broadcasted live, to the entire world!

I left the guys to start rigging as normal and I set about setting up our servers and ensuring all connections were going to work smoothly during the show and this is when we came to our first stumbling block, the venues firewall! For most people, they use a simple firewall on their computer, but the Bonus Arena in Hull happened to have a third party that managed their security and servers, so I started to panic a little.

After some googling, negotiations with venue managers / technical support, and a lot of pacing around the venue we managed to get ports opened and the stream working, about an hour before the fans were due to arrive at the venue. All was ready to rock, cameras calibrated, audio levels set, fighters and event staff briefed, pre-production meeting complete… and now the fans started filtering through the door.

At that precise moment, the wireless connection kept dropping repeatedly – I wasn’t sure if this was something to do with the amount of people in the venue or just Windows playing some stupid game with me knowing that I needed some sort of reliability from an operating system at that particular moment in time. Leon, however, was able to save our bacon with a last-minute ingenuitive solution to our unforseen technical issues – it was our first ever show, so it was kinda to be expected!

So, 2 minutes before the event was due to kick off (at the slightly later time of 7pm!!), we went live online… and the show went pretty much as per normal.

We were all really impressed with the amount of views we received. As mentioned earlier it was broadcasted worldwide, and the google analytics proved this too us with people logging in from all corners of the globe!!